don't believe in this theory. There's no valid in it. Forgive me for sounding mean, but I hate that loser, Roger Long. He know nothing about the Titanic, her passengers, crew, & Captain. His "theory" goes against every survivor accounts.

Tyler, the problem here is that survivor accounts are notoriously contradictory and even when they agree, you still have the matter of trying to make sense of what you see, if anything, in the dark.

As a sailor myself, I know all too well just how deceptive it can be out there on the ocean, in the dark, even under ideal conditions, and with no moon out that night, conditions were not ideal.

There are survivor accounts which assert that the ship broke up and at least as many which assert that the ship went down intact. Since we have the wreck itself to go by, we know beyond question or debate that those who said the ship went down intact were just plain wrong.

What Roger Long did was nothing less then what any good scientist does and that was to work on the problem, run tests and mathamatical models to try and best explain what was [i]actually observed.

Regarding the angle of the break, that much is, I'll conceed, a matter of some controversy. The nature of science is that there is always some room for refining a theory or discarding it entirely if new evidence justifies doing so, and I think Mr. Long would be the very first to tell you that. What he never said was that the ship was weak. He suspected it may have been, but the testing data didn't support it and he conceeded as much.

The hull girder was well designed and plenty strong enough to take whatever the North Atlantic could dish out. What it wasn't strong enough to do was survive the consequences of human fallibility which stressed the hull to the breaking point.

Exactly, Michael. Ships aren't designed to sink. They were designed to float. So, if a ship breaks up as it's sinking, that doesn't mean that the ship was weak. It means that the process of sinking has placed the ship in a position that it was never meant to be in.

As far as the Titanic being weak, I'd point to both the Olympic and Britannic. The Britannic sank intact (albeit under different conditions). And the Olympic was on the seas for decades without damage to the hull girder.

The only two survivors I know of who specifically quantified the stern's angle before the break both said that it reached an angle of approximately 30 degrees. (One of these survivors quoted that figure in his personal memoir of the disaster while the other survivor represented the stern by drawing a line that was 30 degrees above the horizontal.) I think this estimate is within a very few degrees of being spot on.

>>Ok, so maybe I was defensive. But Titanic was at a 45 o angle when the light went out. Tell me that.<<

Why would I tell you something like that when the math goes against it?

It may be the case that you're right about this but keep in mind that the sole witnesses who speak to this saw what they saw in the dead of night where even under the best of conditions, what you think you see may not be what you really get.

Don't forget that there were eyewitnesses...Lightoller for example...who also swore that the ship went down intact and they were wrong about that. The datum we have of the wreck itself is graphic proof of that.

These people were also trying to make sense of things under extremely stressful conditions and they were not trained observers. These problems just don't go away.

I'm not going to dismiss this entirely. The witnesses may have got it right and there might be a factor at play which wasn't factored in the number crunching, but the problem here is that I can't prove it.

Although eyewitness testimony can have its drawbacks, it doesn't follow that someone's math is necessarily more reliable. (After all, the engineers who built the bridge at the Tacoma Narrows calculated that their bridge was perfectly safe, and yet a good stiff wind was more than enough to blow it down.)

For what it's worth, the observations of my two "30-degree eyewitnesses" were made before the ship's lights failed, so it's difficult to see how two independent, easily-made observations of the brightly-lit ship could be mistaken by more than a few degrees. (Indeed, the 30-degree figure will be mentioned in Sam Halpern's upcoming book on the disaster.)

I'm guessing that Lightoller probably saw the stern rising to that extreme angle after it originally settled back into the sea following the breakup. (Lightoller didn't realize that the ship had broken in two, and he said that the stern eventually reached "an absolute perpendicular position.")

I heard that when the Stern borke off after being pitch 45o, some people thought the stern was going to float on its own. Now I read & watch the Titanic story, over a thousand times. if the stern could float on its own, than, why didn't it? T. Joshua Frederick

If the break-up was clean, the wreck would show that. We're missing 100+ feet of the wreck. Therefore, in very simple and basic terms it either crumbled as it broke up (more likely stretched like taffy and collapsed/broke up) or was ripped off during the stern's descent. Current theory is that the former occurred.

Wow! Some One hundred feet of the Titanic Missing?! I see. Forgive me, but I just going to say it. There two great things that Titanic sank: One is that she is with & not scrapped. Two, is that because of her & the people she took with, we now have lifeboats for everybody. If it wasn't for that, even Queen Mary wouldn't have eoungh boats for everyone. In fact, if Titanic didn't sink, it is doubtful that Queen Mary or any ship would have lifeboat at all. that said, I would like to say wow! To be in a lifeboat & see Titanic break the way she did would just be mezmaraising. Tyler J Frederick

I have just read The Discovery of the Titanic. And I found alot of things in Robert Ballard's book that blows this theory right out of the water. First off, Robert Ballard's word are bond. Two. Who found the werck? Robert Ballard. Three. Who comfirm the world that the Titanic had indeed broken in two? Robert Ballard. Dr. Robert Ballard knows more about the Titanic than Roger Long. Robert Ballard did said that the Titanic did reach an angle of 45o before the ship broke in 2. We have testimonies that said she reach this angle before the lights went out. This tells me & Robert Ballard that Titanic broke in 2 on the spot. I support Robert's comment about the double bottom, "They found a fragment, big deal. They are fragment all over the Titanic werck site. The Titanic hit an iceberg & sank, get over it." I support him for that. despite the cold dark night, The survivors did see the ship pitch her stern 45o before the lights went out & snap in 2. Ballard was right, people really need to get over it. My 67 year old Grandma said the same thing. Neither Me, my Grandma, & Robert Ballard don't believe in rewriting history without evidence needed to do so, & that fragment of a double bottom is not enough to change the history of the Titanic. I support Robert Ballard, & I'm not a fool for doing so & I'm not sorry about destroying this theory. Really, I'm not sorry at all. Tyler Frederick

>The survivors did see the ship pitch her stern 45o before the lights went out & snap in 2.

The only specifically-quantified accounts that I recall reading said that the stern reached an angle of about thirty degrees before the ship broke in two. Could you please quote two or three of the survivor accounts you mentioned in which the survivors specifically said that the stern rose to 45 degrees? Thanks very much.